13 de febrero de 2012

Quantum Programming Languages in South Brazil

Por
juliana.vizzotto

The main focus of our work is the development of high-level quantum programming languages. More specifically, we work with the design and semantics of functional quantum programming languages. Basically, we start with simple-typed lambda calculus. Then, on top of that we add a non-deterministic monad for quantum parallelism, and finally we add arrows for quantum measurements. The work has a more theoretical flavour in the investigation of the categorical models and also has a more practical flavour in the use of the language for the investigation of quantum algorithms. We have a prototype implementation of the language in Haskell. Our first motivation is to try to understand quantum computing using well known models and tools normally used in the design and semantics of traditional (not quantum) functional programming languages. Second, we hope our work can approximate the computer science (and informatics in general) community to quantum computing. We hope that for a cs student would be easier to understand quantum computing and to develop quantum algorithms using a high-level quantum programming language than to use quantum circuits or linear algebra. Of course this is a under development work and there are many things to be done still, as higher-order, high-level quantum data structures, quantum algorithms, etc.Nowadays, we work at Federal University of Santa Maria (UFSM) in the South of Brazil, where we have undergraduate courses and also a cs master course.Here one can find some of our publications.